...if I can be allowed a mediocre generalization, don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life and it'd lose even its imperfection.
Haruki MurakamiSputnik Sweetheart

The truth is scandalous. But without it, nothing has any worth. An honest and naive vision of the world is already a masterpiece... As you approach the truth, your solitude will increase.Michel Houellebecq

And if a man lived in obscurity making his friends in that obscurity, obscurity is not uninteresting.Yevgeny Yevtushenko

My only job is to be talented.Anton Chekhov

Boredom, of course, like any mighty force, you must respect.Saul Bellow

He often made great mistakes and arrived at false conclusions, still he had so much genius and knowledge that a great part of his work will always remain true.Arabella Buckley, speaking of French naturalist George-Louis LeClerc, Comte de Buffon, Intendant (Administrator) of Les Jardins des Plants, anticipator of Darwin and Lyell

It is only kings, and the nobility, and those fortunates who dwell in the tropics, where bread grows on trees and clothing is unnecessary, who have reserved seats in this world.Charles Dudley Warner (from an address to the Alumni of Hamilton College, NY, 1872)

"I may not agree with what you say but to your death I will defend your right to say it."Voltaire

"I may not agree with what you say so shut the fuck up you fucking fuck."No-one will admit to this one, but I have my suspicions.

E@L no longer seeks permission to link other blogs here, nor expects notification of linkages in return. That is the most stupidest "netiquette" crap ever. You are on-line? You are fair game for being linked to, deal with it.

"The Web exists because no one has the right to grant or withhold permission for links."Cory Doctorow.

Other E@L Sites

BlogThings

(Non-Singapore Hosting)

Sat Oct 04, 2008

OK Time To Move On

Everyone hates my logging in procedure here, even me, with PMachine. So, after the ticker clicked over 600,000 hits, I'm taking everybody's advice for once in my life and shifting ALL new posts over to Blogger. Despite all my barking about the iDiocy of popular products lines, in the last year or so I've got myself an iPod, and iPhone, and an iMac... I may as well sink completely into the morass of mass-consumption mediocrity and do it the simple way. The new name is:

As I'm paying $6 a month for THIS site, I expect it'll be here for a long time yet for those who wish to browse the most excellent archives. I might even put them together into a PDF for downloading at some stage. (Why do I say these things?!) If I could find a way to send over the old posts to Blogger, I would, but, hey it's nearly dinner time and I've hardly left my room all day as it is...

OK - so GO HERE from now on. Redirect your links, update your RSS feeds, do whatever you feel necessary to stay in contact. Email is the same.

I have to take umbrage this - for some reason Creepy has turned into a master Aussie baiter!

~~~~~~~~

IN MY OPINION...

What a truly pioneering Aussie spirit this young Australian boy evinces. Excellent work, Holmes! Let's rid this damned country of all these strange animals, either by eating them (the original aboriginals munched through most of the mega-fauna in their first 40,000 years in Australia - roast giant wombat tucker! You bewdy!) or by following that great tradition that united the humble swagman and elitist farmer alike in Australia's noble past (that included getting rid of most the original aboriginals):

If it moves, shoot it. If it doesn't, chop it down.

Of course, even such valiant attempts to remake this great southern land in the image of our caring and ever loving motherland, Old Blighty herself as bringing a few harmless rabbits and the like are deemed vandalous and illegal by the bloody Greenies.

Those commo, poofto, lesbo, wacko hippy, tree-hugging Greenies! Wish we could shoot them too! But crikey, you can't kill anything to make a living these days!

Still, we have a great country under our feet. A huge country with vast tracts of ... iron-ore, copper, bauxite, uranium. FYI, this knowledge is often brought to us by naked geologists, those who work part-time at the topless bars in Kalgoorlie and hence need an all-over tan (I kid you not - the ex-husband of one of my previous girlfriends [not the public-bench girl] can vouch for this!)...

So of late, with China booming and calling out for raw-materials lead to metamorphisize into the alchemical gold of manufacturing profits, using coolie labor of course, Australia has a new mantra. Australia, that enormous empty island, that open-cut mine with a sea-view:

If it can be turned into toxic products in China, dig it up and sell it!

A sun-burnt country, a land of sweeping plain-faced red-necked wives on the patio looking out over the cane-fields at the bio-fuel crops...

What's a few ancient lizards, I ask? Been on the planet long e-bloody-nuff I reckon, couldn't be smart enough to evole into something else, fuck, em! Good onya lad, you're a bloody legend in my book! Give the boy a gun next, I say; set him on the bloody Asian and Muslim immigrants in the big smoke, in bloody poofter central, Sydney!

Shagging In Public

Here's a meme that should score some hits...

~~~~~~~~~~~

It was confession time this morning. A friend of mine who is no longer famous admitted to having shagged by the Singapore River late last night, near the multi-colored bridge not far from Gallery Hotel. I pressed her for details (natch! I'm always thinking of you guys!) Not just oral; full sex. With a friend, she modified, not some random guy. She seemed to think herself quite the outrageous tart...

"I once had a shag on a public bench in a park, surrounded by squawking swans," I casually countered, placing a coffee sachet in the new (2nd hand) Philips Senseo. I was in my late 30s at the time, hardly the over-hormonized youth, but still capable of outrageous acts...*

Her chin dropped. "Oh my god, really?"

E@L you wild action-adventure hero! I didn't mention that it was nighttime and I was petrified and drunk at the time and that the swans were more likely ducks or geese (I couldn't tell in the dark) that had been trying to sleep until our shenanigans disturbed them.

I had to drag the two of us into a park in order to gain some privacy, as afforded by the nocturnal conditions, for my partner (the sexual aggressor in the situation) seemed intent that it would be neither here nor there if we should do it outside the nightclub on the footpath, in the lights of the traffic streaming down Main St. Maybe she thought the pulsing lights meant we were still on a disco-floor, one of her other preferences for deeply intimate contact.

I decided that 'there', at the side of a billabong, in a nearby park, under some coolibah trees possibly, rather than 'here' on the street would be the safest bet for not getting arrested for public indecency and interfering with protected wildlife. I found a bench just out of the street-light, and a few ducks, geese and/or swans scampered away from us. In the fevered breathing and fretful searching among disheveled clothing (it is freaking cold in country Australia at night, this was not a nekkid thing) we managed somehow expose the appropriate regions of engorged flesh sufficiently to unite them briefly for some awkward but cathartic grunting...

Another safe bet would be to find a condom, but in the struggle to achieve our physical unification, one of the aggrieved bloody swans took it! (Not really, but wouldn't it be funny if...?)

~~~~~~~~~~~

I press the blue light on the coffee machine and a shot of espresso moistens the bottom of my cup. I seem to recall that the bench-top conflagration didn't last quite as long as it took me to prepare this nice coffee.

I seem to recall also that the lady in question sort of came to her senses (omni animale sunt embarrassed post public coitus) at this point, and horrified at what had happened (again) started off at an exceedingly brisk pace in search of her hotel, in which direction she knew not, with E@L following up the rear shouting directions and apologies for allowing himself to be raped by her (again)...

~~~~~~~~~~~~

I retire to my room, feeling a mixture of smugness and shame, and commence this blog.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

So where, gentil reader, have you "done it?"

E@L

* (I'm not counting the semi-public performances of horrific indecency perpetrated by Bruce and the myriad others who write under the E@L pseudonym that have occurred behind the velvet drapes of certain clubs in Wanchai (HK), not to mention Manila, Phuket, Hanoi, Kiaoshung, Beijing, etc...)

Thu Oct 02, 2008

Whatever Happened To Harry?

Still I haven't heard anything further in the press about Harry Nicolaides detainment in Bangkok on that charge of lèse majesté ... I blogged about it nearly a month ago. Coincidentally today, just as I was drafting this comment I found a nice review of the Thai use of this "crime" on an Australian blog called New Mandala. It seems even the King is not such a big fan of the lèse majesté law, but it is a convenient method of stifling dissent, or just shutting up trouble makers failing any other seditious acts or words (or thoughts). How Nicolaide's offense comes under that rubric is beyond comprehension.

Here's his mother talking on the radio on YouTube: many of the comments to the video are satirical (at least I hope they are!).

As a further aside, it seems that Nicolaide's book Verisimilitude was privately published in a run of 50 copies of which only seven were sold. The international writers organization PEN has taken up the case. How the Thai police managed to pick themselves up one of those copies AND find the offending bit (3 lines with no names mentioned) about Thai princes who shag around a bit is another mystery... Someone dobbed him in, of course (or was it a publicity stunt as some commentators on this blog have suggested?).

And of course, now that the case is in the media, the "fictional" accusations just gain more credibility in reality. According to what his mother says, he was told about the alleged royal person's alleged misbehaiour by a Thai person, and he wrote it down. That his book was banned and that there was an arrest warrant for him was not communicated to him by the book's distributors.

It's about time Harry was released from the hell of "Bangkok Hilton". He has suffered more than enough for what in a normal society wouldn't even raise an eyebrow... (Except maybe in Singapore, or Myanmar or Stalinist Russia.) This is a ridiculous over-reaction!

Free Harry Nicolaides!

How do you start a Facebook campaign?

E@L

p.s. on a style note, one reviewer allegedly said the book was the worst thing he had ever read...

The Best Policy

Nong had small teeth, short teeth. Memorably short. Very little distance from the biting edge to the gums. What had she worn them down chewing on, Bruce wondered?

Still, he admitted to himself, she was very pretty. With sparkling dark eyes, long wavy hair worn loose, smooth dark skin and soft high cheekbones above a captivating set of dimples*, she carried her still excellently proportioned Thai body with an erotically charged casual ease. But she was not so young anymore. On closer inspection, her muscle tone was more mellowed than the other girls, her tummy a few centimetres too loose now after several pregnancies. She no longer had the saleable hard-body of her youth. She admitted to being 32. She admitted to having only couple of long-term boyfriends from overseas. But she was not available to the customers like Bruce on a daily basis any more: she was now the mama-san of this small beer-bar at the far north end of Pattaya beach.

In this capacity she stood in for Louis, the French manager of the bar, who only came in for one or two beers around 10pm to check on the nights meagre takings. Nong sorted the girls out, made sure they were healthy and ready to work, made sure they were fed, encouraged, prettified; she checked their lists of fines and credits for Louis to later tabulate against what they still owed him for rent and for personal cash loans; she made sure they called out "Hello, welcome!" to all the potential customers passing on the way from the Dusit Resort to the nearby stand to grab a tuk-tuk or taxi along Beach Rd to Walking Street...

The beer-bar Nong was running was one of a pair in the open space at the bottom floor of a Japanese club (Susie). The provenance of this old place was uncertain as was the choice of the three elaborate Roman style columns** which bore the weight across the front of the building. They could not have been selected by owners of the Japanese club, surely not. One hoped that they pre-dated the refitting of the place as bars and were in keeping with its original use. Maybe a small hotel was once here? A bank?

Each beer-bar had its drinking area at the opposite end of the space to the other. They were run as separate businesses, managed by different people and the girls had a fierce but not quite serious rivalry. The bars were mirror images of each other, architecturally reflected at the central pillar and the door at the back of the bars which led to Club Susie. Around that door of dark-glass were lighted signs in green, red and pink curly Japanese script***, presumably inviting entry and promising all sorts of Nipponese thrills in the discreet "karaoke" rooms upstairs. Several shelves of ambiguously Japanese trinkets, like Hello Kitty dolls, flanked the door. Buddhist prayer flags and winds chimes danced in the slight on-shore breeze of evening out by the front of the bar, under red and green striped eaves. Both of the drinking bars were decorated with large yellow and black diamond tiles. There were chrome-framed mirrors behind the glass shelves which held bottles of Galliano, Midori , Vermouth, Cointreau, Cognac, Johnny Walker (Red and Black) whiskey, and of course Tequila, the bar-hostess's standard short drink. Several show-bottles of twisted glass sported colored fluid that tempted no-one, not the most desperare hard-case. The mirrors reflected harshly back into the customer area all the bright fluorescent tubes and the red colored snake-lights, as well as the mirrors of the equally garish opposite bar. It was not a visually quiet place.

Pattaya Bar, 2001

Business? It was quiet in that sense. Bruce was the lone, early customer. He sat and watched the sunset from his red vinyl stool, trying to drink slowly to avoid a sour Thai stomach which would be the eventual result if he continued his preferred Pattaya diet of Chang beer and chili noodles for too many days at a stretch. He turned and hunched his heavy frame forward stretching the blue Hawaiian shirt Ooh had chosen for him in the market yesterday, and leant over the bar to see what the girls were doing. Noi was writing in her diary, practising English. Ooh had been trying out some new makeup style to go with her denim shirt, one which pinched her small breasts into something approaching a cleavage, but had paused to send a txt message. It failed to go. She had no credit on her phone-card. She complained to Bruce: "I owe seben towsend baht, my phone calls!" Bruce shrugged. He was giving her 500Baht for each day she spent with him already. What more could he do? He would buy her a present on the last day. Or maybe a present for her baby in Bangkok.

Mama-san Nong had been seated on a white plastic chairs at one of the marble dining tables, writing something silently for a while. She pushed back the chair and moved gracefully to behind the bar and placed herself in front of Bruce. She wore a conservative black halter top which left some inches of her slightly flabby belly exposed above her grey pants. She smiled a well practiced genuine smile at him. Those short teeth. "Kha Bruce, can you hep me with write letter my terak in London."

Bruce smiled back and put his beer holder down.

"Of course. What have you written so far?" he asked.

She seemed a little embarrassed at the short letter that had taken her so much time to compose on the table. "My dahling, my terak. I miss you. I love you." She looked up and said, "That is all I heb so far. You must hep me, hokay." She handed the letter across to him.

Bruce dropped his chin to his chest in order to hide his amazement and amusement as he read. After a silent spasm shook his shoulders he looked up, took a deep breath, cocked his head and said, in a mock-serious tone, "And DO you love him?"

Nong's falsely genuine smile disappeared and what seemed to be a real expression came into her face. She pursed her mouth slightly like she was trying to hold back a laugh. Her brilliant eyes flashed at Bruce, sending waves of understanding and communion into his, and her cute dimples rapidly deepened. She was eternally beautiful at this moment, even though her teeth were nearly worn away, even though her tummy was not so taught, even though she was mightily old at 32. She looked at him without guile or pretense. When she spoke to him, he was certain she was being honest. He had never heard a Thai girl speak so truthfully.

Wed Sep 24, 2008

Funny, You Don't Look Japanese

Something always goes wrong, right? Always. In over 10 years of doing my job there has never been one, that's ONE (1), time that a work trip and associated demo or training has ever gone smoothly.

Something always fucks up. The crucial cable is missing. Someone plugs the 110V machines into a 240V outlet, twice in ten minutes (I kid you not - and it wasn't me.) The plane is late. The bus is early. I travel 14 hours but they don't accept male support staff into the OB scanning room, so I travel 14 hours back again.

Last night I arrived in Chennai. I say night, but it was early morning in my brain's GMT. Things went uncommonly smoothly from the moment as I hit the stale, dusty, rotten-carpet stench of the airport's terminal. I got through immigration on a two person queue. My luggage came it out, like third! I was out of the terminal in record time. Trouble brewing, karma-wise.

I walked into the outside air, whoof, turned to the left and slowly went past all the greeters who stood behind a steel-barrier fence, holding A4 pages of various names printed with a dot-matrix quality for me to decipher. No "E@Large c/o LocalCo".

A second lap found my BOSS's name on the clipboard of one white shirted, moustachioed desperado-looking dude. I said to myself - "Is that MY Nagasaki-Hiroshima-san?" Must be a coincidence. Very common Japanese name. The boss isn't coming till tomorrow, he's in Vietnam today.

I did another lap. No E@Large signs still, even at the Non-Exploding Marriott stand. I went back to the Nagasaki-Hiroshima guy.

"Is that the Mr Nagasaki-Hiroshima from LocalCo?"

Heads all around the area start to oscillate laterally. Mumbling breaks out in various shades of Tamil and Hindi and English as the people next to him translate my query into desperado-ese.

"From LocalCo, yes indeed..." he finally admitted, rubbing a finger on a large mole on his cheek.

A level of light went down in the desperado's eyes and began he to look at the sign he held as some sort of poisoned package. He took it down, and looked at it, showed it to me. The date was 23rd. Tomorrow.

"He's coming tomorrow night, see? Tomorrow. The 23rd."

Desperado was crushed. I said, "It's OK I'm here. Mr E@Large." He pulled out his mobile and started to call somebody. I asked him to come down to the gate where I could get out of the crush of other people looking for *their* fucked up messages and hotel-car bookings. He disappeared back into the crowd of greeters with the phone to his ear and moved to the left. I followed him on my side of the barrier. Then he pushed through a different section of the layers of greeters and handed his phone across to me.

I couldn't understand a word. Maybe there was something about two printouts, grabbed the wrong one...

I said to desperado, "Yes, it's OK you can take me to the Marriott now. Mr Hiroshima-Nagasaki will be here tomorrow..."

He wobbled his head, which I took to mean either nothing, or OK, or damn it.

When I got to the end of the barrier he took the trolley from me and headed off into the murk of the carpark, never looking back. I hobbled as fast as I could, trying not to lose sight of him as we wove through the chattering baggage boys, tooting Ambassodors backing into parks, gesturing old-lady beggars, surprised families asleep in the moon-umbrage of the trees.

Fri Sep 19, 2008

On A New Drug

I want a new drug
One that wont make me sick
One that wont make me crash my car
Or make me feel three feet thick

I want a new drug
One that wont hurt my head
One that wont make my mouth too dry
Or make my eyes too red

One that wont make me nervous
Wondering what to do
One that makes me feel like I feel when I'm with you
When I'm alone with you

Fuck that Effexor poison, never taking that crap again. I want a drug that won't make the dick shrink or make me piss myself. Plus, I felt 3 MILES thick!

The Neuro Doc this morning put me on a very benign yet hopefully effective treatment based on alpha-lipoic acid (thioctic acid). When I say "based on" I mean "consisting of only".

According to the specs I've picked up in a quick tour around Googletown, it seems to be quite the bee's knees. No side effects, no adverse effects, no overdose possible. As a cynic, that would suggest to me that there are probably NO effects whatsoever, including positive ones and I might as well shove it my arse as rub it over my belly but, hey, I'm paying good money here, let's roll with this... Let's turn up the positive on the attitude-o-meter!

A vitamin-like substance that is naturally occurring in the body, which when boosted by supplements helps repair memory loss and liver damage, may hold off certain types of cancer, and works well against peripheral neuropathy. Essentially it is an antioxidant that also snaffles up radicals attached to other antioxidants and makes them (the antioxidants!) effective again.

It seems to everything except make coffee in the morning and clean up the house.

Fingers and toes crossed that I get some improvement from it. It takes about a month to kick in, so possible progress will be more molassic than meteoric, but at least I'm doing something rather than sitting around whingeing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Speaking of sitting around, I received a new exercise regimen from the Osteopath, too - he wants me to do these exercises in slow-motion. "Compression" stretching or something he calls it. Only 4-6 reps, but SLLLoooooooowwwWWWly. Mainly leg-strengthening stuff (helps my knees post the meniscal tear of last year) balancing my body back on the exercise ball... very demanding and they should also help prepare me for the ski trip next year (Italy, or Austria again). But only once or twice a week he says.

Tough, but fair. Let's see.

E@L

[p.s I accidentally wiped out an old post while loading this one. I am an idiot. Wonder if it was one of the "good" ones?

Tue Sep 16, 2008

Capitalism Will Eat Itself

Greed greed greed: dig in, dig in, dig in... All you can eat until you disappear down your own profit motive.

(Image the Red Baron, whoever the fuck he is)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And in France a real contender in the next election is The Anti-Capitalism Party. Good on 'em. Drive as many tractors as you want into McDonalds...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mind you, I've done pretty well riding on the profit motive wave myself, but the downright evil-doings of those who dreamt up the short-term gain pyramid scheme of the Sub-Prime Mortgage disaster have set the world up for the next Great Depression.

Libertarians and right-wingers will say it was because there was too much regulation and legislation. I say, the world and the people know better.

Government is the only power, gives the only voice that people have against rampant corporate greed. Regulations and control, check and balances, are the way to rein in the saurian stupidity of the self-interested corporations. (Not counting the Bush Corporation/Government of course.)

Mon Sep 15, 2008

Hot Or Not?

Ooh, yeah baby, nice glands! Big and juicy and so hhhaaawwwtttt!

My cervical lymphatic chain is charged up and firing after what must have been merely a strep throat. The colour lines within the dark and swollen lymph nodes demonstrate the small arteries which are more prominent than you would expect to see in non-inflamed lymph nodes.

Treatment: pain relief... and avoid spreading it to others. So no swimming in the public pool and no oral sex in the typing pool. At least not on the giving side. It'll have to be 68s for a while...